"It's all yours ma'am," I say. 

Oops.  I've been trying to break myself of saying ma'am as some women find it offensive but I'm pretty sure she didn't hear me so I drink down my Budweiser and then order another.

After a pause she says:       

"Please don't call me ma'am."

"Sorry 'bout that," I say. 

Oops again.  I've been trying to break myself of saying: sorry. 

"The ma'am thing is just a silly habit from childhood," I say then smiling.  The fresh Budweiser is cold and it's good going down.

She is pulling a cigarette from the Marlboro package while at the same time saying: 

"Ma'am makes me feel old."

I figure she is kinda old but she's still strangely attractive to me and that's somewhat unsettling.

C'mon Norm.

Sometimes people sit in bars and say nothing and while we're saying nothing I'm thinking about a woman in Michigan (I made love to her on the handicap access ramp at a school for leader dogs while it poured rain and I remember how the coins came out of my pocket and how they rolled down the ramp in an indentation made by the wheel of a wheelchair moving across the cement when it was first poured).

"Did you make it through Hurricane Jeanne alright?" she says. 

"Can I buy you a drink?" I say.

When the band stops playing my 79 year old Crystal Gayle puts money into the Rockola CD Digital Jukebox and begins moving to Foxey Lady by Jimi Hendrix.

"She can really shake her groove thing," says a guy (with a head like a basketball) sitting to my left.   

I'm thinking: 

Her groove thing?

"I'll take another Budweiser," I say to the bartender.

    

Later on, I slow danced with her while Tony Bennett's The Good Life came out of the Rockola Jukebox speakers.  She told me she loved me and then started coughing in my ear and I had a hard time trying to break free of the hold she had on me.           

At around one in the morning she put money into the Rockola again and started dancing to Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix while at the same time pretending to be shooting some kind of weapon.  Basketball head said he thought she was shooting an imaginary M-16 rifle and went into the reasons why he thought this to be the case...

He said:   

"Set on full automatic that baby will shoot 700 rounds a minute but she hasn't changed the magazine once and there's only about 19 rounds in a magazine so I'm not sure she is firing an M-16."

The bartender thought she was having some sort of seizure and thought seriously about pulling the plug on the Rockola but he didn't.

Towards the end of the song she got caught up in her own hair and fell onto a wall mounted display rack of Herr's Pork Rinds.

She asked me to give her a lift home, but to be honest, I was a little scared of her. 


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